CEN21LA291 · Piper PA-28-180
Iron Sights Aviation Piper PA-28-180 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Northern Colorado Regional Airport (FNL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN21LA291
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- Ground fatalities
- Unknown
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Piper PA-28-180
- Aircraft type
- Piper PA-28
- Category
- Airplane
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N9277J
- Operator
- Iron Sights Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Northern Colorado Regional Airport (FNL), Loveland, COTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 55 years (built 1966)
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- Defining eventThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that he was conducting practice maneuvers with a student in the local area when he observed virga developing in the distance. He decided to return to the airport and assumed control of the airplane. During the landing, the airplane encountered a “strong right-to-left wind” gust and began to drift off the runway centerline. The instructor decided to execute a go-around and “quickly advanced to full throttle.” The airplane yawed to the left and continued to drift until it was no longer over the runway. The left wing impacted the ground in the grassy area adjacent to the runway, and the airplane cartwheeled before coming to rest near the parallel taxiway. The airplane sustained substantial damage to the fuselage. The flight instructor reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the airplane that would have precluded normal operation. At the time of the accident, the instructor pilot was landing on runway 15 with wind from 200o at 20 knots. The flight instructor reported that he was aware of a convective SIGMET for thunderstorms and there were thunderstorms in the vicinity at the time.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s failure to maintain aircraft control during the landing flare and subsequent attempted go-around with a strong quartering crosswind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN21LA291
- Event ID
- 20210625103345
- Case number
- CEN21LA291
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2021-06-25.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 8fad015257218015495f2d6219982c2f9407a67bf2ffb658003c9a9ab48abbc4; retrieved 2026-09-16T14:13:00.751Z.